This you can try at home! Folding@Home: Protein "Folding" and Very Distributed Computing

Document Actions

Have a few extra machines lying about that don't get maximum usage? Consider using them for the Folding@Home project.

For reasons that were apparent to us at the time, 2Realms.com uses a combination of computers, including a G5 Mac Tower, a Nexenta/Solaris x86-64, and a PS3 running, variously, YellowDog Linux, and, of course, PS3.

Now we have a reason that was only apparent to us a few days ago: Folding@Home.

Folding@Home is a project out of Stanford University that attempts to understand protein folding (and, therefore, "mis-folding") in an effort to research diseases, including (according to their web site) "Alzheimer's, Mad Cow (BSE), CJD, ALS, Huntington's, Parkinson's disease, and many Cancers and cancer-related syndromes." It's all too technical for us, and we don't quite understand what they're up to, but it seems that they can use an extremely distributed computer network to do this. In fact, they can use your machine at home.

So check out their web site: http://folding.stanford.edu/ and see if you're able to contribute. It's way less painful than the local blood drive (but you should keep doing that as well).

We're going to use at least three machines for the cause. If you have a Sony PlayStation 3, you will need to upgrade your system to 1.60 to participate.